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| 20-year-old tells his story of addiction |
By: DAN, Guest Columnist
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Posted: Friday, July 11, 2008 11:01 pm
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(Editor’s Note: Dan e-mailed the News after our heroin series began and expressed an interest in getting involved. We asked him to write a first-person account of addiction. He has asked the we publish his photo and first name only. Here is his story.)
I am a 20-year-old male who has been born and raised in Northfield. I graduated from Northfield High School in 2006. Growing up I played sports, had a lot of friends, and loved to be outdoors. I have two older brothers, one is two years older than me, and the other is four years older than me. I currently still live at home with both my parents, but I am moving to Mankato late this August to attend Minnesota State University, where I will be majoring in alcohol and drug studies with a minor in psychology.
Drugs started at a relatively young age for me, I started with marijuana and stuck only to that for years. Up until at about the age of 16 or so was I introduced to the pill called OxyContin. When I was introduced to it I literally knew nothing about it, I was just told how wonderful it made you feel and how much fun it was. It also just so happened that at the time I was working at a place that had it on hand and I had complete and full access to it. I let my curiosity get the better of me.
I had no reason to use drugs; I had a good life for a teenager. I had two older brothers who looked out for me and two parents who did the same and so much more. Anyway I ended up stealing the pills from the place that I worked at, and I did that for quite sometime until they started to catch on to it. I knew they knew what was going on, and that they were watching them very carefully now. I didn’t care; I knew I was going to get caught because I couldn’t stop taking them. I did finally get caught for taking them, fired, and faced legal consequences.
Even that had no effect on my using.
When I would get the drugs, I would do them in secrecy, basically. None of my REAL friends knew that I was using, or at least I didn’t think so. I used in my car in parking lots, bathrooms, just about anywhere that I could get away from people to use. It got to the point where from the second I woke up in the morning to the very second I fell asleep at night, the only thing I could think of was how I was going to get more and where I would go when I got it.
At the heaviest time of my using, just about a year ago, I was working full time at a decent job, making decent money for a 19-year-old still living at home with no real bills to pay. Every one of my paychecks went to the drug. It was ridiculous, and I couldn’t even afford to put gas in my car just to get to work.
That’s when I started stealing from other people. Didn’t matter who it was, either; I stole from friends, parents and complete strangers.
It wasn’t till I got fired from that same job for stealing that it finally hit me that, “Wow, I am in serious trouble.”
I had broken my parent’s hearts, almost lost the best friendship of both my brothers. One of the best friends I have had in my entire life almost left ‘cause she could not tolerate my lying, stealing and manipulating any more to get what I needed. It was then that I decided treatment was way more than necessary. It was not a game anymore for me, it was life and death.
I went in to treatment in November 2007, nervous, scared and anxious. I never thought that this could have possibly happened to me. No way, not with the family and friends I had. Thankfully I went in to the treatment center with full support from my friends and family — they were with me every step of the way, helping me through it. It certainly was not an easy thing to experience, but when I was in treatment I was looking back on the life I was living, and I realized that what I was doing before treatment was not living at all, I merely existed.
Here I am eight months later, clean, and life has never been so good. I finally have control of my life again, for the most part, I suppose. I say that because I am still tempted, and I still think about it just about every day. It is tough but what keeps me from using again is, my family being the first, and my goals. I have set goals for my life because I know that I am meant to be so much more than I was.
I am attending Minnesota State University in the fall and am really excited. I am majoring in the alcohol and drug studies program there because I want to be able to better help kids in need. Helping people gives me such an incredible feeling. I don’t wish what I went through on anybody. It is unnecessary and can certainly be avoided. We just need to understand that nobody is safe from it, not even here in Northfield, Minn.
— Dan will live with his family in Northfield until this fall, when he will attend college. |
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